Benefits of efficient consolidation: Short training enables long-term resistance to perceptual adaptation induced by intensive testing

Abstract

Intensive training or testing reduces performance on perceptual and sensorimotor tasks. Here we show, for the visual texture discrimination task, that such adaptation-related performance decrements are practically eliminated following practice with a small number of trials and sleep. Thus, short training produces consolidation of an effective memory within the visual neural network, resistant to the performance decrements that are usually induced by intensive testing. We suggest a link between perceptual adaptation and learning: resistance is achieved by sleep dependent consolidation of distributed changes in network connectivity before saturated due to over-training. This link between memory generation, perceptual adaptation and memory consolidation may have an essential role in the underlying mechanisms of perceptual and motor learning. Therefore, intensive training yielding performance decrements in other modalities, such as the sensorimotor system, may be viewed in the context of the mechanisms suggested here.